Roberto Bolaño’s Lost Manuscript Coming to The Paris Review

Roberto Bolaño’s Lost Manuscript Coming to The Paris Review

If only allfans of dead authors could be so lucky.
TheParis Review
has
announced
that, over the course of four issues in 2011, it will be publishing Roberto Bolaño'snovel
The Third Reich
, which was
discovered
among the Chilean writer's papers after his death in 2003. (It will then bepublished as a hardcover edition by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.)

Thefirst-person novel appears to have been written in the late 1980s, before Bolañobegan the novels that made his reputation here,
The Savage Detectives
and
2666.
A blogger at the
Independent
summarized
the new book as follows:

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It concerns Udo Berger, a Germanwar-gaming champion holidaying on the Costa Brava before a big tournament, whofinds himself sucked into a paranoid battle with an enigmatic local figure, ElQuemado. There was, in fact, a real strategy board game,
Riseand Decline of the Third Reich
, which Bolaño seems to have used as hismodel.

NatashaWimmer, who translated both
The SavageDetectives
and
2666
into English,
told
Granta
that the new book is "a buoyantnovel, ominous at moments but mostly just funny." Spanish-speakers can read thefirst chapter of the novel
here
;for anyone else who's curious, the
WallStreet Journal
's Speakeasy blog has a
briefexcerpt
of Wimmer's translation.

Until thefirst chunk appears in the
Paris Review
'sspring issue, you can get excited by reading Paul Berman's
Slate
essay
on
The Savage Detectives
("a love song to the grandeur of LatinAmerican literature and to the passions it inspires") and Adam Kirsch's
review
of
2666
(which "has the confident strangeness of amasterpiece").

Nina Shen Rastogi is a writer and editor, and is also the vice president for content at Figment.